Rated- W

Stone says the film won't be an anti-Bush polemic. Rather, as he told Daily Variety, it will be "a fair, true portrait of the man that asks the question: how did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?"

Uh....riiiiiiiight.

The film will cover Mr Bush's obsession with invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein – which Stone suggests is to avenge the Iraqi leader's much ballyhooed assassination attempt on Bush Snr.

It will also look at Mr Bush's desperate hunt for WMDs in Iraq and his well known mangling of the English language. The script gives the impression that the White House is Mr Bush's very own fraternity house where discussions about going to war sound like the staff are betting on a football game.

The film will capture notorious episodes including his arrest for tearing down the goalposts at a college football game, his widely reported threat to get into a fistfight with his father when he came home drunk in the 1970s, and how he quit drinking after his 40th birthday when he woke up with a hangover and marching orders from his wife.

Mr Bush will be played by Josh Brolin, who starred in the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men. Laura Bush is being played by Elizabeth Banks, who starred in The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

This is Stone's third film about a US president, following Nixon and JFK. The director has been an outspoken critic of President Bush's policy in Iraq.

But keep in mind while digesting all of this, that the movie (Oliver Stone, folks....Oliver Stone) will be "a fair, true portrait of the man."

Not.

Even Oliver Stone admits in this interview that facts won't get in the way of a good romp into anti-Bushism, under the guise of biography:

I certainly worked very hard on the research for JFK. We even put a book out filled with every footnote. I personally find it disgusting that we have to do that to make a movie. But at the time I felt very defensive about it. And we put it out because we weren’t ripping off, we were in the spirit of what we’d learned. We were talking to real witnesses and getting real facts, but they said that we had invented it all. It’s a cheap shot. So I became super defensive. Then on Nixon, we put out another book of footnotes to explain our reasons. Anyway, I realized it’s hopeless to get those things examined in the light of day: You’re always accused of being a filmmaker. That’s why with W I’ll probably be a little bit freer, because you know there’s not that much appreciation for all the work that goes into fact-checking. I think we can have more fun on it.

~~~

But I think Pinkville [Stone's film about the My Lai, which was shelved in 2007] was worth doing because it wasn’t a massacre story per se, it was about how the worst in human nature is covered up by human nature. And also about how sometimes there are heroes who do come along. In Pinkville’s case, it was a few people — it wasn’t just one. Men who did something — nothing extraordinary — but something more than ordinary to bring out the truth. And the truth is an amazing story. Kids don’t know about My Lai, they don’t have a clue. But unfortunately that’s been lost because of money. The My Lai fallout was a Wall Street deal where the studio was totally chickenshit and caved when their previous film about the Iraq war had failed. It was a total money deal. They give you a numbering system, they number off all their estimates and sales. You get the accountants saying the movie is going to do this, this and this — bottom line we can bank this, you can discount that, therefore you can get that. It’s a very tough way to work, because you’re assigning generally lowball estimates to movies. I think they have about as much chance of being right as those early poll estimates of John McCain getting the Republican nomination.